


Further up and further in

by Petra



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-05
Updated: 2011-06-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 22:27:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He would be safe inside her, as safe as she wanted him to be, in his cage the size of a new universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Further up and further in

**Author's Note:**

> For Kink Bingo, confined/caged. Thanks to [](http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**thatyourefuse**](http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/) for prereading.

She is always going to be here with him and has always been here with him and is here right now with him, wherever here is, except that she's never been here before.

He's inside her and above her and below her and running through her, mad and wild and hers. She has to take him everywhere they have ever been and let him go. She has to let him go and let him come back to her. Trusting him is never the safest part, but if she doesn't let him go--if she didn't let him go--if she stopped letting him go and kept him safe and perfect within her--she would never see anywhere but here, and she has always been here.

Except that here is a new planet, currently, one with a bright purple sky that makes him smile, with vast forests of long, agile-branched tree-clusters that he doesn't understand. She knows there are beasts in the forest who are at least as intelligent as he is, if not as wise, unless it's the other way round, and he will come running back to her clinging to someone's hand and begging her to be where he has left her this time.

The next time they are anywhere that could hurt him, she will not let him go and be hurt.

She's dreamed of keeping him safe and keeping herself safe when he's left her behind in places she shouldn't go, when she has been too deep in space or in some planet's crust, too close to a black hole. She could lie to him and duplicate her control room between one blink and the next, build him a new planet within her with the new-false door just to the left of the hidden-real door, so that he thought he was walking out into a new place but he was walking deeper into her instead.

She's made creatures before, real and false, out of the golden energy of herself, the power and strength of Time. She could populate a world in herself for him, replace the swimming pool and the library and everything but the Zero Chamber with a labyrinth of her own devising. He could walk across new continents and see strange and distant stars in the firmament of her skies. She could make a false version of herself inside herself and make him believe he could fly her.

She's never had an ocean in her before, but she has been under enough of them that she could lie in that, too. Let him swim in her depths and play with her fish-things, dance in the seaweed-beds. She wouldn't have to follow all the rules that the real worlds do; he could breathe her water if he wanted, or if he was foolish enough to get himself close to drowning.

She could save him again that way, and make up some wild excuse--or let him, because he is always happy to explain away the inexplicable. He wouldn't need to know that he was safe all along. She would never let him drown, never let him out to be shot by Daleks, to be menaced by Cybermen.

He would be safe inside her, as safe as she wanted him to be, in his cage the size of a new universe.

The next time he tries to open her door to a place that could hurt him, she will lock him in. He will be hers forever.

But she knows that is a lie; the first bit, at the very least. She could no more keep him from leaving than she could stay on this purple-skied planet for the rest of forever, and she could no more deceive him with imagined and created planets than she could forget his name. He would see her patterns in a century or five, and he would want to see the true galaxies again. If he consented to stay, if he asked nothing more of her than to see the worlds where nothing could ever hurt him, then she would build him more and more galaxies within herself and be content with it. But that is not what he asks, and it is not what she wants.

There is no future, no past in which he runs from her and stays away for long, not in all the times he has put himself into a human's mind or body, not in the times he has found the one he calls the Master and fallen afoul of him, fallen into bed with him, not in the billions of times he has fallen in love with creatures who cannot know her the way he does, nor know him the way she does. Nor has she, will she, could she hold him hostage from himself. He will be hers forever, and they have been everywhere, will go everywhere, everywhen.

But he cannot go without her, and in that sense, she will keep him to herself as surely as if she never opened her doors for him again. It will have to be enough, but it has been enough, and so it will continue on, as it has been, as it must. It is true in every time, and therefore it will always be so, at least in some time or other. He is always safe inside her, and she will never let him go.


End file.
